- Accepted Paper
Minding the gap between hard and diffractive structure functions at the electron-ion collider
Phys. Rev. Lett. - Accepted 26 October, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/7jkz-3r9q
Phys. Rev. Lett. - Accepted 26 October, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/7jkz-3r9q
Diffraction is characterized by forward scattering and a large rapidity gap. Ordinary hard scattering also produces gapped events and presents a significant background to identification of diffractively produced events. We present a fully differential factorization of gapped hard scattering. We find that the unpolarized azimuthally-dependent structure functions $F_{3,4}^{\rm gap}$ and the longitudinal $F_L^{\rm gap}$ vanish at leading power for hard scattering. Azimuthal dependence is thus a pure diffractive signature. This is borne out in Monte Carlo simulations.
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